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I’m beginning to suspect that the Palin choice is an overt target, a “throwaway”, designed by the Rovians to create sympathy amongst women for the McCain campaign when she finally is burnt. She might never have been the choice, only a useful backstop until the real VP nominee is selected.

If old Republican stalwarts like Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan can be objective and honest about the stupidity and irresponsibility of McCain’s choice of Palin, why can’t our trolls do the same? McCain really fucked up. I do have to wonder when she will be removed from the ticket.

If there is any validity to a theory for the bizarre antics of this GOP campaign, it may be that they are looking for a way to bring Huckabee on the ticket. He is a raging right winger with solid support from the South, has good numbers with Blue Dog Democratic faithful, and can be sold as a progressive populist for economic change.

Speaking of poor choices, a question for busdrivermike. If Obama loses the election, will you believe that those who chose him to be the nominee over Hillary are, to use your same words, “really fucking stupid?”

I agree with Pat. It’s hard to see Palin as President. It’s not even the experience thing with me. It’s an intangible quality. I can’t quite put my finger on it yet. I think it’s more my problem than hers, but I’ll have to use my giant brain to try to figure out just what exactly troubles me about her.

I won’t say McCain messed up until he’s lost the election. Same thing with Dems who picked Obama over Hillary. If he loses in November, The Democrats messed up by picking him. We really won’t know if it was a bad move until it’s over. That said, I think he should have gone with Romney or Huckabee.

Troll are you extraordinarily obtuse or with only a 14 years old’s life experience or just plain stupid? Do you ever read a comment and think about it before responding in any manner other than how you can do a Hannity or O’Reilly bend to the facts and /or go off into a somebody else does/doesn’t do it too tangent? You are truly a troll and I wonder what possible benefit you get from commenting here. You change no one’s opinion with your juvenile approach. You are simply a poor version of PuddyPud, who is a self-parody.

–adjective 1. not quick or alert in perception, feeling, or intellect; not sensitive or observant; dull. 2. not sharp, acute, or pointed; blunt in form. 3. (of a leaf, petal, etc.) rounded at the extremity. 4. indistinctly felt or perceived, as pain or sound.

“The point is not that her teenage unwed daughter got pregnant. The point is the hypocrisy of another holier than thou no sex until marriage abstinence only GOP family that lectures the rest of us about how to behave. Incredible.”

Obama’s pick of Biden as his running mate was a reach into his party’s and America’s past.

McCain’s pick of Palin as his running mate was a reach into his party’s and America’s future.

Palin had the integrity and guts to quit a $130K job for ethical reasons.

Obama couldn’t even quit a church that had a rabid, foam-at-the-mouth anti-American pastor.

Obama didn’t pick up much of a post-convention bounce.

Palin, not Obama’s speech, were the talk of America last Friday morning.

Goldy giving the GOP political advice is like getting a physical from a pathologist – looses a lot in the translation.

Ordinary Americans can identify with Palin. Demeaning her and her family for the news she announced recently about her daughter will only serve to increase the regard extended to her by the people at large – they identify with challenges and issues like that, and they will support someone who’s been where so many of them have been, or are now.

All the complaining about Palin’s lack of experience only serves to highlight Obama’s even less experience.

The nasty stuff spewed about Palin and her family has been expressly disavowed by Obama, and the more that stuff goes around, the more harm it does him.

Obama is showing himself to be just another tiresome liberal Washington, D.C. insider. His selection of even more tiresome Biden, who couldn’t get above single digits in Iowa this past winter, is solid evidence that Obama, when he gets really close, can’t bring himself to get into the boat of change. Instead, he got into the sinking boat of politics as usual.

Palin is fresh, exciting, charismatic, and she resonates in a visceral way with Americans much the same way as did Ronaldus Magnus Reaganus.

I can see why Repubs like McCain’s pick of an Alaskan secessionist: It gives them hope the Old South will rise again and darkies will be slaves again. Slavery is the cheap labor conservatives’ ultimate wet dream.

Today in Minneapolis, The Huffington Post hosted a panel discussion about the rise of new media with a host of leading traditional media personalities. Conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham applauded the rise of the online journalism. “Look, the old media blew it; the free market does work,” she said. But many of her conservative co-panelists lamented the perils of this free market.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said the flip side of the emergence of the blogopshere is that “it’s so ugly now in some parts of the internet” that good people are being dissuaded from running for office. Scarborough explained that he thought about running for Senate in 2005, but when word leaked out online and commenters began “trashing” him, he said, “screw this, I’m going to get paid for talking on TV.”

His fellow conservative media elites chimed in with similar criticisms:

Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan: The commenters “are much like what you would have gotten in 1880 if you walked into a bedlam with a megaphone and said, ‘I’d like to say a few words.’ It’s wild, it’s crazy, and it’s awful, and it’s often quite vicious.”

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson: People are “really underestimating the vitriolic dumbness” that’s out there. “I don’t think there’s any way to understate it. … It’s mostly on the left,” he said, and it’s “totally intolerant.” It’s “the least liberal thing I have ever seen — the default position is ‘I don’t agree with you; you are either stupid or corrupt,’” he said. “I think it’s actually hurting the country.”

Conservative pollster Frank Luntz: “You’re right,” he said to Tucker. “Mean would not describe it. It is as humanly vicious as it possibly can be,” he said, adding that it is “deliberately insulting.”

Even liberal columnist Margaret Carlson echoed the views of her conservative peers. “The left is as vicious, if not more so [than the right used to be] and cruel,” she said. “There’s an element of ‘they’re mad and they’re not gonna take it anymore.’”

Scarborough then proposed a solution. “Why don’t internet sites that want to be respected make people [commenters] put their names and their phone numbers”:

If you are going to accuse me of being responsible for starting the Holocaust in 1939 or 1940, then you can put your name, and you can put your telephone number on there so I can pick up the phone and say, “Brother, my lawyer’s going to be calling you in about 10 minutes.”

Arianna Huffington agreed with him about the need to keep commenters from “hiding behind the cloak of anonymity.

Wow, I love to watch Republican cops beating up pregnant moms, kids in baby strollers, and senior citizens! It’s just like Republican warmongers bombing weddings and day care centers in Afghanistan! Republican campaign them: You don’t have to go to Kabul, we’ll bring Kabul to you!

@27 This is such a joke. Rightwing hate radio saturated the country with “ugly” talk long before liberal bloggers came along — in fact, the latter are largely a reaction to the former. For at least 60 years, “good people” have been dissuaded from running for public office by the lies, smears, and character assassination attacks of rightwingers. The real reason these rightwing whiners want our names and phone numbers is so they can slash our tires and make harassing calls at 2 a.m. Here’s a news flash for you little nazis: We liberals aren’t gonna be passive punching bags for fascist asswipes like you anymore! We push back! How do you like them apples!

@32 He used to be a lawyer. Lawyers are paid to say silly things, untrue things, absurd things — anything that will get their guilty client off. What every lawyer wants most is a gullible jury. Although crackpiper isn’t a lawyer anymore, old habits can be hard to break, and you can’t blame him much for wishing for a gullible electorate. He does that without thinking* (* there’s no evidence piper has ever thought about anything), it comes to him as naturally as breathing, and as is automatic as a rabbit shitting on a lawn. In other words, crackpiper is a feral creature whose actions are governed by instinct.

Do you even pay attention? Palin will be off the ticket by Wednesday at this time. She is a liability, a loose cannon, a liar, a power monger and a fool. This is what happens when you make decisions with your gut, fail to vet and are desperate.

Actually there is more truth in 10 minutes of right wing radio then what the combined MSM puts out in an entire day. Once the “un”fairness doctrine was eliminated right wing talk radio was going to happen whether Rush existed or not. The real media was predistined not created. Rush just happened to be at the right place at the right time. That’s all.

A Republican U.S. attorney in Colorado has decided that 3 white supremacists who openly talked about assassinating Sen. Obama and were caught with sniper rifles and silencers were not a “serious threat” and declined to press federal charges.

An article in Time Magazine describes Palin’s stint as mayor of Wasilla as disruptive, partisan, and polarizing: “Palin was a highly polarizing political figure who brought partisan politics and hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control into a mayoral race that had traditionally been contested like a friendly intramural contest among neighbors.”

(Quoted under fair use.)

Roger Rabbit Commentary: McCain will try to sell his running mate as a feisty independent who can reach across the aisle to build bipartisan coalitions. Don’t believe that bullshit for one instant! She’s a George W. Bush in a 1950s hairdo with an 1880s agenda.

Jake Tapper asks: “What would the response be if Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and his wife Michelle had a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter?”

I can answer that. Mona Charen, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin would sprout bat wings and fangs and start divebombing, Peggy Noonan would issue a pained sigh that would ruffle nun’s robes from here to Hoboken, Laura Ingraham and Bill Bennett would engage in a finger-wagging contest to condemn our loose licentious liberal culture, and Jennifer Rubin at Commentary’s Contentions would crash into the wall doing cartwheels.

Bristol Palin should be left alone, but Wolcott is dead-on about conservative hypocrisy on the story. Just think back to 1994 and the story of Susan Smith, who drowned her two children. Then-Congressman Newt Gingrich was not exactly reluctant in seeking to milk that story for political purposes. “I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things,” he said. “The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” (As it turned out, “Smith had been molested as a young girl by her stepfather, Beverly Russell, a big Republican leader in South Carolina…At Smith’s trial Russell admitted to having sex with her two months before the murders.)

And Wolcott’s also right about the real significance of the current soap opera, namely that it raises questions about “McCain’s judgment, Sarah Palin’s reproductive stance, the paucity of what we actually know about the governor herself

What it comes down to is this: The Democratic Party is the party of life and the Republican Party is the party of death. If you want war and wolves, turn to the Republican Party; if you want to improve the health-care system, turn to the Democratic Party. The Republican Party despises life and sex. It only cares about you if are unborn or brain-dead. A person who is alive, a person with a body that experiences desire, a person with a body that lusts after other bodies—that is a person who the GOP wants nothing to do with. To borrow an example from an antiwar protester: If the U.S. Air Force drops bombs on enemies and innocent civilians, the GOP does not give a damn; but let those same planes drop condoms or morning-after pills on enemy territory, and the GOP will be out on the streets in a minute protesting and screaming about the killing of babies who are not yet born.

Sarah Palin has shown herself throughout her career to be ruthless and recklessly ambitious. Now, she demonstrates that she is even willing to sacrifice her daughter to her political ambition. She is a detestable creature.

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